The Greg Morozumi Manifestos (in memorium)

Greg Morozumi, at a community gathering in Oakland (2005) Photo: arnoldo colibrí (C)

arnoldo colibri

The Greg Morozumi Manifesto number 1

He is calling all people of the color of the land

Guided by his spirit animals

Turtles and black panthers

that carry his fleshy soul into the highest levels of class struggle:

Where humans and animals

Plants and dirt

Wind and rain

Skys and rainforests

The sun and the moon

The constellations and the caracoles

The peoplel of ceremony and cosmic chants & prayers

Undomesticated the unemployable, the outlaws & imprisoned,

the queer and not so queer

the straight and the crooked teethed

the unfree and the imprisoned by industrail fields and prisons

The unruly scribbles of poets and hip artists with flamethrowers for spraycan walls

the maroon dreamers that no state can rule

those who carry wars on their skins and borders on their backs

Unite, become a specter haunting

the class struggle

upheaving the remnants of the third world

Making art fists and power a daily ritual

Greg Morozumi in his solemn silence roars: 

Remember who we are, where we’re from 

We are seed soil water wind and sun

We are our own art and song

We are the art of self-determination

the hands that plant cultivate and harvest liberation

the body that is memory resistance rage and tenderness

Greg, we have nothing to lose and third worlds to gain . . .

Day 620 | June 17, 2025

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The Greg Morozumi Manifesto number 2

Face the struggle,

Make liberation the Great Leap Forward of every step you take

My heart is black—the color of revolutions without borders

My veins the yellow quartz that binds the sun

My lungs the saxophones of the red colibrí 

Our dreams

spinning on the turntable

of the philosophy of the masses

Will make a hundred fists bloom

Will make our poetry grow from the barrel of a gun

Will bring us back from the edge of forgetfulness

And our prayer will work to end all death and separations

Our prayer was the proletariat

Our prayer is the original people

Our prayer is the surrounding

the invisible cities from the invincible mountains

Our prayer is the unbreakable horse of our utopias

I deciphered your silent vowels and your unstoppable motion to reach the horizons — or at least go to China town to savor one more time

the taste of our free homelands

This is a manifesto to grant you

many bodies

many lives

to live

to make the revolution of turtles and panthers

to speak in tongues as prophet of the homelandless

to make jazz and blues the colors of our eyes 

You lay in deep sleep, hungry for justice and a bit of soup and pan dulce 

You are not silent.

We know your demands

We hear you chuckling and swaying to the beat of your political lines and spirals 

Whirlwinds of the oppressed, unite

We have nothing to lose.

Day 621 | June 18, 2925

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The Greg Morozumi Manifesto number 3

No one is alive until we are all alive.

No one is art until we are all art

No one is love until we are all love

No one is in front and no one is in the back:

No one gets left behind.

Drum on the turtle’s shell

Sleep in the panther’s night

Dream the international of dirt the international of water the international of wind the international of suns  

We will make the human human again

Organize the vanguard that listens to the day laborer

Organize the underground that the farmworker can plant seeds in

Organize the party that surfs on the spontaneous ocean waves of the masses

Organize the men that bow towards the women

Organize the four directions that find their center in the X of Malcolm

Organize the ancestral dreams of liberation that hum in the throats of our children

Organize the humans to live in their place in the web of creation

Organize the ten pount plan of buffalos, spiders, crows, the coyotes and their philosophy of plumed serpents and howling lunar eclipses

Deindustrialize decolonize your hands

Let your eyes turn into the sixth sun 

Let your eyes become the language of cosmic upheavals

Greg Morozumi meditates and fasts

his body becomes the silent accumulation of revolutions to come

Day 621 | June 29, 2025

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The Greg Morozumi Manifesto number 4

Remember the good, never forget the bad

If the community doesn’t teach you how to love

You end up loving alone

And you will make things bad for someone’s heart

The heart never forgets, always remembers 

And the heart pumps out the bad and stores the good forever 

The good is the wisdom of the comrades

the bad is the wound that carried you to solitudes 

the asteroid that sliced the revolutionary in half

Tenderness is the justice of your hands around her waist

Memory is etched on the map of the palm of your hands

The good and the bad 

The palm-reader cannot read a slap on her face

She will never forget your hands open or closed

your hands are either flower buds or thorned fists

Your voice became silent became

the cenote [the circular well] of your cosmos

Where only jazz and poetry could enter

Your smile your hope of understanding

You will become a Buddha without even desiring it 

You can escape any prison or exile 

Except the bed of abandonment 

You are books, turtles, the mangled logic of freedom,

the sisterhood that held you alive

Your Buddha body calls out:

become unfold rise fly rebel

It is right to rest

The revolution needs eight hours of sleep

to dream the rest of the time

The revolution will sleep and dream silently for the next 50 years

Day 623 |  June 20 2025

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